Private and charter air provider Wheels Up reported a 35 percent year-over-year increase of its corporate membership fund sales in the fourth quarter, the company announced Thursday.
Fourth-quarter revenue declined 10 percent year over year to $183.8 million, "reflecting discontinued membership programs, lower group charter sales and the divestiture of non-core services businesses in the third quarter of 2025," according to the company.
Still, corporate membership was the fastest-growing of Wheels Up's channels for the period, as it has been in several recent quarters, and it represented 40 percent of overall membership fund sales for Q4.
"When I got here [two years ago], it was in the 20 percent area, and now it's 40 percent," Wheels Up CEO George Mattson told BTN during an earnings preview call. "We've grown corporate membership block sales over the last two years by about $100 million. It's very meaningful and accelerating. Our compound growth rate over the last two years has been 25 percent, and it's accelerating off of larger numbers."
Mattson during a Barclays conference on Thursday was asked how the company handles the weekend peaks and weekday troughs of private aviation. He noted that historically, the company was more leisure-focused. Though its mix is now 40 percent corporate and 60 percent leisure, "we're getting to what I think would be an optimal mix at 50-50," he said.
Helping Wheels Up get to that balance is Delta Air Lines, one of the company's owners since August 2023. The two work closely on offering a joint solution for corporate customers, according to the company. So much so, that in recent weeks, Wheels Up restructured its sales team to better align with Delta in the corporate space, Mattson told BTN.
"We now have a sales structure that not only combined our Wheels Up membership and charter teams together but then organized it the same way that Delta is organized: regionally and by industry group," he said. "There's now a counterpart, a sales leader at Delta, who corresponds to a sales leader in our organization."
That reorganization included some layoffs where there were redundancies, "but it was relatively small in the context of the total initiative," Mattson said.
And while Delta is a "significant part" of the increase in corporate sales for Wheels Up, Mattson pointed to the company's client servicing and its operational performance as reasons for the category growth.
"We have really turned the operational performance of the company around," Mattson said, noting the company has "less than a 1 percent" cancellation rate.
Additionally, "we've really invested into servicing those clients in a very elevated way," he said, "We've simplified the structure; we've come to them with solutions that weren't really presented before. … Your own [corporate] aircraft can only do so much. What are you doing around supplementary lift? What are you doing around board meetings? What are you doing when your plane is in maintenance? There are a lot of use cases."
Wheels Up Q4 Metrics
Wheels Up reported a net loss in the fourth quarter of $28.9 million, compared with a net loss of $87.5 million a year prior.
Full-year revenue was $736.5 million, down 7 percent year over year. The company's net loss for 2025 was $294.2 million, compared with a 2024 net loss of $339.6 million.
Wheels Up, however, during the fourth quarter reported its first-ever positive earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization at $32.9 million, up from a negative EBITDA of $11.3 million a year prior.
Mattson remains optimistic. "2026 is the pivot year where we complete the programmatic and fleet transition that we started in October 2024, and we're going to complete that a year ahead of schedule," he said. " From this baseline that we've now settled at, that makes sense for us on the go-forward. We should expect to see really good growth."
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